Dan Phillips wrote:May 26, 2009 - Geoff Johns is one busy, busy guy. In less than two months he will be simultaneously helming, writing and coordinating a revival of the Flash (which is now six issues), DC's major summer storyline in Green Lantern and Blackest Night, the return of Conner Kent in Adventure Comics and the definitive origin of Superman in Superman: Secret Origin. All fans of the DC Universe have their eyes on what Johns is planning, and many are already mapping out what Blackest Night titles they will be purchasing.

With new chapters of Green Lantern and Flash: Rebirth just around the corner, and with Adventure Comics and Superman: Secret Origin on the way, we tracked down Johns for a brief chat. Green Lantern #41 hits stores Thursday, May 28. Flash: Rebirth #3 arrives on June 10. Adventure Comics debuts in August.

Kelson wrote:The new issue of Comic-Con Magazine (originally the newsletter for Comic-Con International) is up, with a focus on comic book writers and an extensive interview with Geoff Johns. At one point, the interviewer asks about a Flash: Secret Origin story.

I will be doing the Flash Secret Origin. He’s never had a secret origin book….with Green Lantern Secret Origin, it’s a book now and that book actually outsells the other GL trades because you look at it if you’re in a bookstore or whatever and that’s the first one you’ll pick up because it looks like that’s the first volume….the Flash Secret Origin will be one of those books that you can hand to anybody.

In 2008, Geoff Johns told Newsarama that he planned to "do to the world of Flash what we've done to the world of Green Lantern."

"We want to turn The Flash into a pillar of the DC Universe, just like Green Lantern has become a pillar," Johns said. "Our goal is to elevate the Flash Universe."

That goal got a slow start, as delays plagued the launch of Johns' mini-series, Flash: Rebirth. But now that his run on The Flash has kicked into high gear, the writer is working to create excitement for the Flash Universe.

The concentration on Green Lantern and the Flash make sense for the chief creative officer of DC Entertainment, since the company is also focusing on developing those two same franchises for film. While Johns works with Warner Bros. to push forward plans for a Green Lantern movie sequel and a script for The Flash film, he's also energizing those two franchises in comics.

For Green Lantern, that energy will come from a crossover event that Johns clarified for us yesterday in Part 1 of our discussion.

For the Flash, Johns will write Flashpoint, a story being drawn by Andy Kubert that was teased at the end of The Flash #1. And according to an announcement Johns made at Comic Con International in San Diego, that event will spawn a second Flash title called Flash: Speed Force.

That second title mirrors how DC handled the Green Lantern Universe when Johns took over Green Lantern and a second title, Green Lantern Corps was launched. And the focus of Flash: Speed Force appears to be similar, since it will focus on the other speedsters of the DC Universe, such as Bart Allen, Wally West, Jesse Quick and XS.

In Part 2 of our discussion with Johns, he discussed what's coming in Flashpoint and what he wants to do for the Flash Universe.

When the title "Brightest Day" was announced as DC's next year-long event, most fans thought the name indicated it would be an upbeat comic.

As readers have found out, the bi-weekly is anything but upbeat.

Instead, the title conveys the theme of the comic -- one that is the antithesis of DC's last event. As Johns told Newsarama in 2009, explaining Blackest Night's story, "The overarching theme of what these heroes are dealing with is death... What is it? Is it a bad thing? Or do we have to just accept it?"

But this year, Johns and his Blackest Night co-writer Peter Tomasi have turned the white spotlight around, instead focusing on life itself.

It all started when a white light resurrected 12 previously dead heroes and villains at the end of Blackest Night. That kicked off Brightest Day, and during the last 15 issues of the bi-weekly series, Johns and Tomasi have been exploring how the characters' second chance at life hasn't been that easy.

For Johns, Brightest Day also represents his return to the year-spanning type of event he helped establish in the 2006 weekly book 52. (His return to these types of multi-week events is a little surprising, considering the writer works full time as the chief creative officer of DC Entertainment in the Burbank offices of Warner Bros.)

As we finish up our three-part interview with the writer, we talk with him about Brightest Day, although he revealed no details of the story's upcoming beats. Instead, he dropped hints about what comes after the bi-weekly ends, confirming that he'll be writing Aquaman in a comic next year, and that there are plans for him to write a third series outside the Flash and Green Lantern universe. Plus, CCO Johns drops a hint about a Vertigo series that is under development outside comics.

Jeffrey Renaud wrote:Why should Larfleeze have all the fun? CBR's bi-monthly visit with superstar writer Geoff Johns is back just in time for the holiday season, so slip on your Green Lantern ring and get ready for the GEOFF JOHNS PRIME Christmas Special.

Each time around, Johns answers a number of reader-generated questions while discussing the work he's doing at DC Comics, which includes telling epic adventures in "Brightest Day," "Green Lantern" and "The Flash," while overseeing multimedia projects ranging from the forthcoming Green Lantern movie starring Ryan Reynolds to the recently announced Batman live-action show in his role as DC Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer.

This time, Geoff let's CBR readers know where we'll see Aquawar unfold, which superheroes are featured in "War of the Green Lanterns," some of his favorite parts of the Green Lantern film and plenty more.

But that's enough teasing. Let's open the presents under the tree in this special Christmas edition of GEOFF JOHNS PRIME.

Rich Johnston wrote:Flashpoint is the much hyped, much teased, upcoming Flash-related event by Geoff Johns. Thanks to John Babos of Comics Nexus for allowing us to reproduce his original piece on Bleeding Cool looking into the latest teases towards this storyline.

David Hyde wrote:Aquaman’s second chance at life hasn’t quite worked out the way he expected. His wife has betrayed him, and his powers don’t work like they should. Now, in BRIGHTEST DAY #19, writers Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi and artists Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert and Rob Hunter bring us the Aquawar.

This is a big, bold issue, one chock full of widescreen action and intrigue. I think I can safely predict that the cliffhanger will have fans talking this week.

David Hyde wrote:Aquaman’s second chance at life hasn’t quite worked out the way he expected. His wife has betrayed him, and his powers don’t work like they should. Now, in BRIGHTEST DAY #19, writers Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi and artists Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert and Rob Hunter bring us the Aquawar.

This is a big, bold issue, one chock full of widescreen action and intrigue. I think I can safely predict that the cliffhanger will have fans talking this week.

Here’s a look at the open round of the Aquawar…

This almost makes me think Volume II will be worth reading. Don't think I'll be buying it, though, because Volume I was disappointing after Blackest Night.

Geoff Boucher wrote:The hardcover collection “The Flash: The Dastardly Death of the Rogues” has landed on store shelves, and with the writing of Geoff Johns and the art of Francis Manapul, it conveys the velocity of the Fastest Man Alive with ingenuity and grace, whether he’s dashing across the rotors of a helicopter, snatching bullets out of the air or dismantling a careening car before it hits the ground. It’s not easy to get rising artist Manapul to sit still — the Philippines native and Toronto resident is well known for his globetrotting as co-host of the television series “Beast Legends” — but I caught up with him recently to discuss his need for speed and the rich ink-wash tones he brings to bear on the Flash.

Reis and Prado did the Aquaman pages for Brightest Day, and Reis has been working with Johns consistently since Green Lantern #11. First on the main GL book in classic stories like the Sinestro Corps War, Secret Origin, and Rage of the Red Lanterns. Then came Blackest Night, Brightest Day, and now Aquaman.

No further details were given on the series, but fans of the Johns/Reis collaboration should be able to thrive on these tidbits for the time being.

The popular artist of "The Flash" and "Adventrue Comics," Francis Manapul regaled fans with stories of his time on TV, offered advice to aspiring comic pros, revisited his professional beginnings and more.

In short, Johns made Green Lantern the coolest star in the DC Universe. And he's hoping to do the same now with the Flash.

Barry Allen's scarlet speedster is at the heart of Flashpoint, the epic new event series debuting on Wednesday. For some non-comic fans, he may be the superhero guy who gets referenced often on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, yet Johns is aiming to make him stand tall alongside Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

The Flash literally wakes up in Flashpoint in a totally different world than he's used to. Loved ones aren't the same, some friends aren't so friendly, and he races to find the one guy who can help him solve this mystery: Batman.

Johns has been setting up the Flashpoint themes and story beats for years in his Flash run, particularly in the miniseries Flash: Rebirth that brought Barry Allen back into the superheroic fold. And just as with what he did with Green Lantern and Blackest Night, Johns felt the Flash deserved to finally get a starring role in a DC Comics event.

"He's not about a hundred guys who run fast," Johns explains. "He's not Green Lantern where Green Lantern is about this intergalactic space corps. The Flash's huge canvas is time. I've always said when I was redoing both these characters, it's time and space.

"Batman's the ultimate crime vigilante superhero. You will never ever top Batman, and for time travel and crossing all these different planes of reality, you'll never top the Flash. The Flash owns time."

Whoever is the central character ultimately shifts focus from event to event, according to DC co-publisher Dan DiDio, and Johns is always the go-to guy in the sense of understanding the full scope of the DC universe, the interactions and the subtleties of the relationships between characters.

"When you enter into creating a universe and changing some of those relationships and those dynamics," DiDio says, "he's the perfect guy because he understands what the status quo is and he's able to break that norm in order to deliver a world that's coming out of Flashpoint."

At the same time, Flashpoint editor Eddie Berganza feels that Johns' penchant for putting a "laser focus" on what makes a certain character cool has helped Green Lantern and now the Flash rise from relative obscurity to a more mainstream prominence.

"Instead of dealing with all the little excess baggage that every character comes with, Geoff's biggest talent is to access what's important to some and what isn't," Berganza says. "It's what makes the best story on an emotional level: What do you get the most out of? It's not little trappings about how long the heroes have been around. They all have barnacles, and Geoff is really able to shed them off and get to the point and the heart of the character."

Barry Allen, the Silver Age version of the Flash, has toyed with alternate worlds and pseudoscience themes since being introduced in Showcase issue 4 in 1956. Carmine Infantino penciled the issue, while inks were done by Joe Kubert— father of Flashpoint artist Andy Kubert.

Andy Kubert grew up with these characters, so drawing them now is both fun and harrowing, he says. "When I first started on Batman, my hands were all clammy and sweaty. It's nerve-racking. But with the Flash, that was a character my dad had done, too.

"It'd be along the same lines if I was to draw Hawkman, because my dad had drawn Hawkman. I get a little nervous with that. So when I did draw Flash, I had what my father did in mind, and to me my father is one of the best cartoonists to ever walk the planet. It's pretty hard to live up to that."

Some of Johns' favorite scenes in Flashpoint aren't the big action sequences or large-scale reveals, but the moments between Flash and Batman when they first meet in the first issue, just because of the way Kubert does expressions. It is a story where both characters play important roles, especially emotionally, and Johns wanted to emphasize that.

"The world's so big, you can get lost in it, but as long as I stuck to that, it was pretty refreshing," Johns says. "It's a pretty different story. 'Event' sometimes has bad connotations with it by fans just because they see it's going to be loud and a lot of characters thrown in and no emotional weight, but that's not what I wanted to do. We successfully pulled off an amalgamation of everything."

In other words, expect to see a lot more people this summer in red shirts with yellow lightning bolts.

Rich Johnston wrote:Bleeding Cool reported on how Geoff Johns had been asked by Diane Nelson to restrict the monthly comics he was writing to two. He’d dropped Green Lantern, he dropped Justice League Of America, he’s dropped Aquaman and Forever Evil is coming to an end, leaving him with only Justice League as an ongoing. So what would be his replacement title? We heard it would be a solo title…

Well, it looks like it’s Superman. Ahead of John Romita Jr joining as artist on the book, I’m told by a good newspaper source of mine that Geoff Johns will be writing it.

Look for DC Comics to give that a bit of media play shortly.

The current creative team is Scott Lobdell and Kenneth Rocafort, so with Teen Titans and Red Hood And The Outlaws, that makes Scott three for three on being dropped of late – though I am told to look to the weekly and anthology titles for where he will land next.

Albert Ching wrote:Geoff Johns and John Romita Jr. doing "Superman" together is a pretty big deal. It's not hard to figure out why: The artist that helped define Marvel Comics for the past 35 years moving to DC Comics for the first time, and teaming with one of DC's most high-profile writers (and their Chief Creative Officer) on one of the most recognizable fictional characters in pop culture history.

So Johns and Romita's stint on the main "Superman" series, starting this summer, is a newsworthy thing just by virtue of existing. Yet the pair (joined on the book by the legendary Klaus Janson on inks) sound determined not to coast on the book's novelty: Both make it very clear that they're looking to explore what's "fresh and new" with the Man of Steel, and live up to the lofty expectations their teaming on the series brings.

CBR News spoke with both creators about their "Superman" plans, which include introducing a "damn exciting" new aspect to the 75-year-old character.

Stephen Gerding wrote:As for the controversial decision to change the character's name, Johns explained it to the Post, stating, "We changed his name [to Shazam] for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Shazam is the word most associated with the character, so we just felt it made sense -- a lot of people already thought that was his name, anyway."

Matt D. Wilson wrote:With the debut this month of newly ranked Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, Marvel has officially published stories featuring seven — count ‘em, seven – versions of the character, and that’s not even counting any of the various alternate-universe incarnations. Why so many iterations? Well, basically, Marvel will lose its trademark on the name “Captain Marvel” if the company doesn’t publish a comic with that title every few years. But even then, why couldn’t they trot out the same version of the character every odd-numbered year or something? Because since the death of the original Captain Marvel in 1982, Marvel hasn’t had a Captain Marvel with staying power.

Andy Hunsaker wrote:I'm really proud of what Gary Frank and I have been doing with Shazam. Even though it's a backup, we had a lot of fun with it. We've gone for a tone that has a touch of The Goonies in there, there's classic Shazam in there, a touch of Harry Potter. We're trying to really push Shazam to the next level, and that means Billy Batson, specifically. With Billy, we wanted to push the magic angle and the kid angle more than it usually is, because if Billy already knows exactly what to do and has all the morals of Superman, he's the smartest kid I've ever met, and the nicest kid I've ever met.

I get that. I was one of those guys who was initially really turned off by Billy being a total jerk at the outset. I really didn't like that, but the more he's grown out of that, the more I've been able to settle in and kind of manage my instant fanboy outrage.

The whole first ten pages – it was eight pages of Billy and a little bit of Sivana, setting up that people had been brought to the Rock of Eternity, like magical alien abductions. People have these similar experiences where they move through a door, in an elevator or walk in their bathroom, and suddenly, they're in an underground cavern with this old man yelling at them about how they're not worthy, and then, just as suddenly, they're back home and they don't really know what happened. My thought was that this wizard has been looking over and over and over and over for the perfect one. He's so scared about what happened last time that he's like 'as soon as I find someone that's 100% pure good, then they'll be worthy of that power.' He doesn't even know how long he's been doing it. He just knows it's a long, long time. So, the whole thing that Gary and I went for was that we wanted to introduce that concept first.

So when we meet Billy Batson and he's pretending to be the Billy Batson from 1950 – ultimately, when we revealed he's completely playing those people to get out of that home, and he just wants to turn 18 and get out of that system and get on with his life – we knew that people would be like 'oh my god, he's a jerk, I can't believe this.' But the story's been plotted out A to Z forever. The whole point of this story is to pull back the layers. For this kid, he's built up a wall around him because of everything he's gone through – the different foster homes he's been in, all the bullies he's gone up against. He's built this protective shell around him, like I think a lot of us do. He's a porcupine – he wants people to stay away. "Don't hurt me, just stay away, I've been hurt too many times." The whole point of putting him in the Vasquez family home, with Mary and Eugene and Darla and Freddy and Pedro and everybody, was to put him in a situation where he'd have to eventually bring those walls down. In the very next chapter, when Darla says "the family rule is we all look out for each other," and he says "you don't get it, we're not family," and she starts crying – then in the last bit, you see Billy in his room, and he says to himself "I didn't mean to make her cry." You can see there's a heart in there. It's slowly unfolding. We knew issue #1 would have that big 'what's going on?!' and then the second issue would reveal that there's more to him than meets the eye.

Yeah. At this point, he's feeling more like the Billy Batson we knew, especially when he runs right out to try and talk Black Adam down once he finds out that he's a kid just like him.

To me, right there, that encapsulates and kind of bookends the kid who was angry and shut down – my dog was shut down. We got him from a shelter, and he was completely shut down when I got him, because he'd been in dog fights. We just kind of regress, as living beings, and shut down emotionally, but now he's kind of screwing around. But it took him a while to trust people again, and it's taken Billy a while to finally trust people again – and himself.

Graeme McMillan wrote:The 'Doomsday Clock' writer looks back at abandoning the project before deciding to go forward after the the 2016 presidential election: "Suddenly, the whole story just jumped into my head."

The upcoming Doomsday Clock series from DC Entertainment might feature the first-ever crossover between the DC Universe of Superman, Wonder Woman and the Justice League and the characters of the 1986 classic comic Watchmen, but for writer Geoff Johns, there's far more to it than watching different eras of superhero interact.

Johns met with a small group of press Thursday night at San Diego Comic-Con, where after boarding a yacht, attendees were handed drinks — "Dr. Manhattans" and ushered into a room where Johns spoke about his 12-issue series launching in November. Johns said that the series exists "because [artist] Gary Frank and I have a story to tell."

"We talked for months about this: what the story was, and what we were going to do — there was a day when he came to visit me in London and we walked around the set of Wonder Woman for an hour plus, and just talked about it," Johns said. "Gary's not a fan, he's an artist — he's not like, 'I'm dying to draw Batman, or Doctor Manhattan,' or whatever, he's just dying to do a good story. I'd always told [DC publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio] I wouldn't do the story without Gary Frank because he's the only one who can draw it — the emotion of the story requires something that, I think, only Gary Frank has — so if we weren't doing it together, it wasn't going to happen."

As it turns out, it almost didn't happen, despite the plot having been set in motion by Johns' 2016 DC Universe: Rebirth Special issue, which ended with Batman finding the bloodstained smiley button from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' critically-acclaimed comic book series.

"That day on the set of Wonder Woman, we talked a lot about it, and at the end of the day, we thought, you know what? We're not going to do it," Johns explained. "And then the election happened. And then other things in the world happened, and it changed. Suddenly, the whole story just jumped into my head and I called Gary and said, 'I just have to pitch this to you, because I have this story, and the story is bigger than I thought it was, it's different than I thought it was, it's more risky than I thought it was.'"

The risk, he explained, came in multiple forms: not only re-approaching the Watchmen characters for only the second time since the original series (Before Watchmen, a collection of prequel series by a group of different creators, was published in 2012), but also in telling a story that purposefully pushed the boundaries of what Johns and Frank had worked on previously, and defied expectations in doing so.

"We're not trying to replicate and do what [Moore and Gibbons] did, we're doing our own thing," Johns said. "The story we're telling is a very different story, but it's certainly a very personal story. [The DC Universe: Rebirth one-shot] was a very personal story for me, and this is an extremely personal story. It is a story about everything: Cynicism, and opportunity, and corruption and lies and truth and love, and the lengths people will go for love, and hope. Optimism. Decay. Are our best days behind us, or ahead of us, you know? What is the truth? Do people give up, is it okay to give up, when do you give up, when don't you give up… All sorts of things about how I think we're all feeling."

Readers concerned that such weighty themes might mean less possibility of crossover moments that are just plain cool shouldn't be too concerned, however; one of the few spoilers Johns was willing to drop about the project during his Thursday afternoon panel for fans was that the series will let fans watch "the smartest man from one world talking to the smartest man of another." The smartest man in the DC Universe, according to Johns, isn't Batman; it's Lex Luthor. What trouble can he cause when talking to a man who'd fake an alien invasion and kill millions to force world peace…?

"We could shy away from it and not do it, but I believe in it," Johns said about the series. "It feels like the story we need to tell. We need to tell this right now."